A city lawmaker wants to equip all school safety agents with bulletproof vests after last month’s deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school.
City Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens), head of the Public Safety Committee, will ask the city during Monday’s public-safety budget hearing to invest millions to buy the ballistic armor for unarmed school agents.
“Our school safety agents are the first line of defense if something like what happened in Florida occurs,” Donovan said. “They’re not carrying weapons, at the very least should have vests.”
Giving vests to some 5,000 school safety agents would likely cost around $3.5 million — judging from the $700 price of each Alpha Elite vest ordered for NYPD officers in 2015.
Outfitting volunteer auxiliary cops with vests, as both Donovan and Council Speaker Corey Johnson want, would bring the total cost to between $6 million and $8 million, according to Donovan’s office.
“Vests are just common sense,” said Gregory Floyd, president of the school safety-agents union, Teamsters Local 237. “But Mayor de Blasio only thinks with part of his brain.”
Last month, de Blasio announced that all public schools would conduct emergency drills in the weeks after the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., left 17 dead. Schools already have to stage four lockdown drills and eight evacuation drills a year.